Here it comes. Bill Young is leaning forward in his office chair now, a half-hour into a conversation, and it's bubbling up—rage? passion?—and over what? A letter to the editor in the Review-Journal opposing a tax to add new cops? An angry little dab of spit leaps out onto his lip as he speaks: "I do take it personally. It's my city and—"
Yes? Yes?
He coldcocks it. In one swift motion, he sits back, blinks, and the emotion is gone. He's relaxed in his chair. A well-composed Clark County sheriff. Sheriff of Las Vegas. Chief good guy in a place where people come to be bad.
But there's something undone in this man, something unsettled, here at the peak of his career, 48 years old, married, with children, a nice house, a big job, a good life by most standards. Something's unfinished under his veneer—pretty eyes, clean haircut, dark suit and blue tie, friendly handshake, office full of framed commendations, family photos, a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish. He's charged. Or possessed. Or caught up in a battle he didn't count on, some unexpected fight a cop, a man, can't back out of now.
Sirens pass below the eighth-floor window. He doesn't acknowledge them aloud. Somewhere in there, though, they register. The crime rate has risen more than 12 percent in each of the last two years. That registers, too. As does the low cops-per-capita stat: 1.7 to 1,000. And the fact that Las Vegas makes a plum terrorist target as the nation's political battles rise—that registers loud. It's all in there. Inside the man who is now sitting back, smiling, laughing—a calm, friendly, approachable guy.
Bill Young grew up here, became a man here in Las Vegas. It's a complicated thing, manhood in Vegas. It's a city that measures a man by his excesses, indulgences, swagger, sex, gambling, drinking, the ability to turn a deal, pull a fast one, get lucky, dodge the consequences. A city that not so gingerly refutes manhood in favor of adolescence.
But a body grows whether the mind keeps pace or not. As does a city. Young also grew up with Las Vegas—he watched while the boyish town of nomads sprouted, turned corporate, arrived on the red carpet of pop culture and fattened into the far stretches of the desert, eating up resources. And he landed at the top of law enforcement: responsible for the operation and policies of the Metropolitan Police Department and the Clark County Detention Center; responsible for the safety of more than a million.
Not every man gets to make decisions in a place like this, in a time like this. Not every city faces its rites of passage so forcefully.
You can see him standing there, in 1979, on the table in a cop substation, a bunch of other first-day recruits laughing at him, a bear of a sergeant making a complete ass of him. Bill Young, 22, doesn't know how to put on his gun belt. This does not bode well for a cop. He arrived at the station with his uniform on hangers and late by police standards, which is to say only five minutes early. And here's this man, this huge, hairy, loud sergeant, a man who's going to end up playing a key role in his career, mocking him, standing him up on a table and telling him how to put together his gun belt piece by piece, the cuffs, the holster, the buckle.
"I was scared shitless," he says. "Sgt. [Jerry] Keller made a complete joke out of me ... I was so out of police culture, I didn't know anything—nothing."
He actually wanted to be a fireman. Bet that crossed his mind right about then. He applied for both agencies, the police responded first. He was newly married to a nurse, with a kid on the way, so he took the first available stable job. A Las Vegas police officer.
He had moved to Vegas from Yerington as a child in the '60s, his dad was a highway worker and they'd landed in North Las Vegas so he could work on the construction of I-15. The family of four—parents and two sons—moved into the Green Spot mobile-home park on Las Vegas Boulevard North. Today, the park is a tidy if poverty-stained dive across from a bar called the Opry House. In the '60s, that was a joint called the A1 Club, owned by the Young's next-door neighbors in the trailer park, Don Laughlin and his wife. Yes, that Laughlin. "They eventually moved down to the river and opened this bar and restaurant ..."
By the early '70s, when the Valley had about 150,000 residents and the highway business was good, the family moved to a nicer neighborhood off of Rancho. Young's staunch Catholic mother insisted on enrolling him in Bishop Gorman High School.
"You got exposed to all kind of characters at Gorman in the early '70s: mob guys' kids, casino executives' kids, entertainers' kids, all the movers and shakers of Las Vegas," he says. He was a high-school jock—baseball, basketball and football— the kind of jock who, 30 years later, still wants to tell you the details of a game: "It was Gorman's first championship ever, 1974, my senior year ..."
"I probably wouldn't be sheriff if I wouldn't have gone to Gorman. When I started this political thing, nobody knew me. I was just a cop. When I decided to run [in 2002], a couple of friends made calls in that Gorman circle, families that I went to school with—Gaughans, Fertittas, Tibertis—and within a week I had a hundred thousand bucks. And I was on my way. That era of my life, I'm convinced, made me."
Young called on another high-school connection for a job a year after graduating: Bob Forbuss, then a Gorman teacher and owner of Mercy Ambulance, which then had about four trucks and now has about 60.
"I started bugging him to let me go on rides with them ... that was all it took. I fell in love with this ambulance driving. I wanted to be a paramedic and a firefighter.
"I had never had to stick my hands in somebody's guts to try to stop bleeding before. I'd never had anybody die in my hands before. It made me grow up awful quick."
The Metro color guard marches into the Riviera at 8 a.m. carrying the U.S. and Nevada flags. Sheriff Bill Young welcomes a couple hundred cargo security professionals to Las Vegas. He looks fresh: suited, confident. The nationwide group is here in the post-9/11 climate to network about, among other things, thwarting terrorism. Ollie North is the featured speaker, and somewhere in a speech that mixes canned jokes about the media with slides of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, North makes several predictions about the next terrorist attack on America, as if it's a given. First, he tells the group, as long as there's an "American man" on each airplane, no terrorist is going to try that again, as men will stand up and fight. Instead, it'll be on the ground. Maybe a bomb in a truck. Maybe a school. Or a tourist destination.
Young has heard it all before, hears it everyday, sweated it out last New Year's Eve in high terror alert when Vegas was mentioned among four cities likely to be targeted. Still, it's not something you ever cozy up to. He's a kid from a trailer park in North Town and he's charged, in part, with keeping international terrorists out of one of the world's foremost tourist destinations. It's like fighting off ghosts in the night. So he sits in homeland security classes at UNLV, and serves on panels shepherding $30 million in federal funding to prepare the state's emergency personnel, and bones up on things they didn't teach him on his first day on the job, when he finally assembled his gun belt and they took him to the range and taught him how to shoot, and the very next day sent him out as a bona fide cop—things like nuclear disasters, bioterrorism.
Suddenly, Ollie North's appeal to the male ego, to patriotism, to every man's deep-seated desire to be a hero, doesn't seem like such a far-fetched plan to prevent terrorism—especially when you look at it through the chief law enforcement officer's eyes—whatever it takes.
As soon as North finishes speaking, Young pops out of his chair and heads for the door, a full day's roster of meetings on deck. He weaves through a hallway crowded with conventioneers, walking so fast and hard that his suit jacket blows open. A convention organizer tries to keep up, thanks him, shakes his hand, departs. Young swings open the Riviera's door and strides out into the parking lot, morning sun already hot, the bustle of the busiest tourist destination in America just around the bend. He walks to his truck alone.
It wasn't long after he became a cop that he got his ass kicked. Maybe it's a rite of passage, if not for all guys, then at least for cops. He was assigned Downtown as a solo officer, cruising in a black and white, and on his second week he got called to a bar fight on Sahara.
"It was one of those calls, with pool cues and a badass fight, and you're supposed to wait outside till your backup arrives before going in," he says now, nursing a bottle of water from his office mini-fridge. "But I was sitting there, and the fight stumbled outside, and I jumped out of the car and I got into it. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, and two guys got me on the ground—they had me down on my back and I was fighting like a son of a gun. I was bloody. I got a couple good whacks in, but I'll never forget, I was down. And then this other cop shows up, and here was this guy over the top of me, and before I knew it—he [the cop] hit that guy so hard over the head with his flashlight and dropped him like a ton of bricks on top of me. Knocked him out. Blood everywhere. I'm surprised it didn't kill the guy. It cracked his skull open and they carted him off to the hospital, but it saved my ass.
"I'll never forget that incident. I hadn't really been tested. I'll never forget how dangerous this job can be. You can get in way over your head."
Young took office as sheriff in 2002 with a couple of goals: to lower the crime rate and put more officers on the streets. But in 2003, Las Vegas saw a 20 percent increase in property crimes—almost twice the increase in 2002. Violent crimes rose 2 percent in 2003 and were up 19 percent in 2002.
The area's population has grown steadily at about 4.5 percent—some 100,000 additional people live here now than when he took office. But the crime rate overall has grown faster: 12 percent in 2002, 13 percent in 2003.
After being turned down by the city and county for more funding, he's decided to ask voters to approve a sales tax to put more officers on the streets. The November ballot question—a nonbinding, advisory question—will propose increasing the 7.5 percent sales tax by a quarter-cent for four years starting in 2005, and raise it another quarter-cent indefinitely starting in 2009.
"It's $12.50 a year for the average taxpayer," he says incredulously. "Can you afford $12.50 to put new officers out there?"
If voters approve it, he'll have to go to the Legislature next, get them to pass a law that allows the County Commission to raise the tax. Add to that slow process that it will take 10 years of the tax to generate enough revenue to hire about 1,300 Metro officers, 230 Henderson officers, 150 North Las Vegas officers, and a dozen or so for Boulder City and Mesquite.
Things used to be clearer. Vegas had a way of doing things, and if you grew up in it, you didn't see a need to question it. There were mobsters and cops, hookers and thugs, but it seemed, somehow, like one big family.
Young went to school with members of mobster Tony Spilotro's family at Bishop Gorman; years later he'd be busting Spilotro's Hole In the Wall Gang as a cop; still years later he'd be sharing the top floor of City Hall with their attorney-turned-mayor, Oscar Goodman. Events and entire ways of life that people in other cities might consider problematic have been embraced here, or dealt with in ways that outsiders might consider unconventional, or maybe wrong. Here, it was nothing. It was Vegas, a world unto itself.
Young came of age as a cop in that world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the city had a few prostitutes walking the streets, a few more than was appealing to the average tourist. Sheriff John Moran ran for office on the promise of cleaning up prostitution.
"The town was loaded with them. They were here by the hundreds or thousands," Young says. "You couldn't walk down the Strip—there'd be hundreds of prostitutes out at night. You couldn't walk alone without being accosted. They'd approach you and grab your—well, your family jewels—and peel your watch off before you knew what was going on."
When not working on larceny or violent crimes, cops like Young who worked the Strip were assigned to make "side arrests" of prostitutes, basically just to make life hard enough on them that they'd leave town.
"We knew all these whores, these hookers. We'd pull up and say, 'Get in here,' and throw them in the paddy wagon, check their purse really quickly, just get them off the street ...
"We'd have little contests to see how many whores, these hookers, we could get in the paddy wagon. We'd get 16, 17, 18 girls in one of those things—crammed on each other's laps—then we'd take them to a parking lot where we'd just put them out. Then we'd have a bus there and either take them to jail or we'd take them out to the old shooting range at Vegas Valley Drive and Nellis, and give them a ticket up there. That's the kind of work we did. Get them out of the bus, line them up and just harass them. Get them off the street. Then at 5 o'clock in the morning you'd see this parade of hookers just walking down Vegas Valley Drive to the 7-Eleven ...
"The garbage men would pick them up—they'd attract the garbage men, and they'd have business. Well, it's comical now, but in those days, it was a big problem. There were just hundreds of them."
What is the measure of a man? Is it masculinity? Is it his capacity to fight and fornicate, to move comfortably within cliquish packs, endure indoctrination, age into leadership, carry on the traditions? Or is it the ability to learn, grow, break out and take on new responsibility?
Vegas is, as one visiting journalist recently noted, "a place where men go to reaffirm their masculinity"—hire hookers, drink till it puts hair on the chest, gamble a life savings in one roll of the dice—essentially, escape responsibility, if only for a weekend. As it grows, it may also prove to be a city that escapes responsibility for its growth until it cheats itself out of its own promising future. Vegas is enjoying a heyday—it's on virtually every TV network and in innumerable publications, it's the place to be seen. Visitors keep visiting, and Vegas keeps offering them a wild time, and the city keeps growing.
But any city—even an anomaly of a city—has to pay for its infrastructure, prevent crime, watch out for its kids, build backup economic streams, manage pollution, plan natural-resource use, think. Sooner or later, it faces challenges that outsize its adolescence.
Last Christmas Eve, the 47-year-old sheriff set aside his schmoozing-at-cocktail-parties routine and the comforts of a family-filled home. He put on his uniform and headed alone over to the Northeast Area Command, where he picked a working cop and headed out to patrol a Spanish-speaking area with a volatile reputation. He wanted to go back to the roots of his job, to the streets, something he hadn't done in more than 15 years.
But what he found out is, it's not like it used to be.
The world had arrived at Vegas' doorstep since Bill Young was coming of age, and even since he took office, and the world does things differently. The language barriers were huge. The cultural differences mattered. Minority populations increased here dramatically over the years—Nevada was second only to Florida in net migration of Hispanics between 1994 and 2000 and had a higher net migration of Asians than any other state.
The general population had grown to nearly 1.7 million. And in that 1.7 million, in that swath of newcomers, are thousands of people who don't know a thing about how the old, small, everybody-knows-everybody Vegas worked. People with metropolitan sensibilities, people with suburban expectations.
And, on the underbelly, the crimes were more intense, there were more guns, more drugs. The population growth had outpaced the growth of hospitals, of mental-health services, of courts, of jails, of the 911 operations.
Sitting in his office now, he's got that blank, deer-in-headlights look, the kind of look a man in charge of everyone's safety in a huge city doesn't really want to get caught having. It's not the look of a ballsy gambler or a swaggering ladies man. It's not the look of a man who thinks he knows everything. He looks, in part, like a teenage jock who's been told he has to run 15 more laps. And in part, he looks like a man who has to make a decision to grow—not knowing exactly how to go about that—at the peak of his career.
Young is a Republican who's asking for an increase in taxes. He's a vocal Bush-Cheney supporter who recently told the Review-Journal he doesn't believe there has been any misuses of the Patriot Act that violate the spirit of civil rights laws. Seriously. And then, he's a supporter of Democratic Sen. Harry Reid.
He recognized the need to connect better with minority groups of all kinds, and made efforts to reach them. And then, he got sued for discrimination by a white guy.
"He has reached out to minority communities. People of both genders are being elevated because they are the best persons for the job," Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald says. The department needed more Spanish-speaking cops, so Young started a program to recruit bilingual officers and tapped civilian translators to help in appropriate situations. He required all officers to attend cultural diversity training.
Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy, ranking black officer at Metro, who got a promotion under Young, has nothing but praise. "What I've seen him do is this multicultural advisory committee that includes blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians ... Keller had different groups, separate. But what I like about this one is everybody gets to understand everybody else."
Young meets monthly with men and women who represent the others—people with vastly different lives than the elected official, the husband and father who has a house in the suburbs and enjoys drinking with the guys and watching the Dodgers.
You can tell, the way he talks about the group, that it wasn't a natural for him.
"I'll tell you this. I'm not a flaming liberal, but whether this affects the department, I don't know, but I'm a better man for this. I've learned a lot. I will always be proud of this."
But in June, Metro officer Eric Ducharme filed a lawsuit against Young and Metro: "I believe that the respondent's [Young's] administration unfairly protects minority employees to the point of discrimination against white males," Ducharme, a white male, said in his federal complaint.
Other detractors say Young's push for more cops begs the question of whether he's using the ones he's got efficiently—Metro has been criticized for devoting too many officers in an undercover scheme that virtually entraps pickpockets Downtown; for blanketing some areas with officers and neglecting others; for misusing their Tasers; and for arresting homeless people unnecessarily, among other things.
And last month, a jail inmate, with support of the ACLU, filed suit against Metro in a case in which corrections officers threw firecrackers into a jail cell, harming inmates. The officers were not dismissed, but disciplined, which the victims say is egregious. It illustrates, says local ACLU director Gary Peck, a longtime problem with Metro that Young has not yet fixed: the closed-door, get-out-of-jail-free internal-affairs policies.
"In some ways he's a breath of fresh air, he's honestly self-critical," Peck said. "But there are real problems in the area of accountability when officers behave badly. There is an impulse to look for explanations and excuses."
Young has changed use-of-force rules to be more cautious and invited members of the Citizens' Review Board (which investigates police misconduct) to speak to recruits at the police academy, and likewise, he went to speak to them about the rigors cops face on the streets. But the allegations of cronyism remain.
Young was expected by many to keep riding the coattails of his predecessor, Sheriff Jerry Keller, that same Keller who initiated him to the department on the table, a well-respected, authoritarian, old-school leader.
Nearly midway through his four-year term, you get the sense he's shedding that reputation. But the question is, can he rise to the demands of Vegas 2004 on his own? The office of sheriff has held some big personalities in this town—Ralph Lamb, John Moran, Jerry Keller. Young? Not so forceful a character, perhaps. But it may take a different type of personality to appease the multifaceted demands of the community today.
Officer Randy Oaks, who ran against Young in a somewhat nasty campaign for sheriff, was chief among those who once said Young would simply and quietly carry on Keller's work.
"I'll point out a flaw in my own judgment. I said he'd be a clone of the previous administration, and I was wrong. He's his own man. I think he came in with an open mind, a fresh attitude and questioned why we do things the way we do—he didn't say, 'I don't want to rock the boat,'" says Oaks, who is completing a fellowship at the DEA in Virginia.
"The man is working really hard to try to make positive and progressive changes," Oaks says. "I know he has his heart in the right place. He's not content with the status quo. He's been very active in [international and national] law enforcement organizations, exchanging ideas and philosophies with leaders of law enforcement around the country, asking questions about how they do things in other cities."
Young implemented a program to train officers how to deal with the mentally ill—a group traditionally shunned and dealt with as criminals, which has led to the clogging of jails and courtrooms with people who need treatment, not arrests, lest they end up in the criminal justice system again the following month. He's also cracked down on traffic and DUIs and addressed the logjam with the 911 phone operation.
"Listen. I'm not one to blow smoke," Oaks says. "I've got 30 and a half years with the police department, so I'm not afraid to say what I think. If I thought he was a total bozo and was screwing things up, I'd tell you."
But pushing for responsible responses in a city that loves to get something for nothing is no easy task, particularly if that means cruising around town asking people to pay more taxes. A highly transient population, along with an enormous and growing retirement population, makes for a tough sell.
Plus, Young is a conflicted man—he resents the retirement community's anti-tax power in Vegas—"there's a pharmacy on every corner," he laments about the proliferation of retirement neighborhoods—but adds that his own mother lives in one of those communities. Similarly, he derides the comfortable suburbanites for not feeling responsible for the broader community—and yet he lives behind a guard-gated wall in an exclusive country club.
Still, he pounds the pavement, visiting different community groups almost daily to pitch his plan to put more cops on the streets. This is not the work of a street cop, a guy who likes to fight crime. He arrives with a certain degree of schmaltz, hat in hand, at rotary clubs and Kiwanis meetings to make his case that the time has come to pony up for the safety of everybody.
"He's everywhere all the time. That is very much a Bill Young thing. He's everywhere," says Boggs McDonald, who was iffy about his decision to go to voters with the tax. "But is he approved of by policymakers? Unanimously. I think everyone holds him in high regard."
Keller says of his protégé now, "We have some things in common. And we keep in touch. But I'm only here as an ear—Bill is his own man. ... No one knows the responsibility of sitting in that chair until they're there ... and he's getting his feet on the ground.
"Bill's greatest strength is to cut through the bureaucracy and keep a police focus on the community."
Bill Young—older now, receding hairline, a paunch over that gun belt, a cop who once rushed into a fight and got in over his head—wonders: Is the community ready to take on its share of the responsibility? And is he the man to lead it into action?
Twice he's been able to wrench back the frustration as he sits in his office and talks about a community that doesn't want to pay for its growth, a body that wants to grow without a brain. This time, the emotions win. He leans forward again, sets his water bottle down, and pokes his finger into the chest of some invisible bully.
"I'm not going to sit here on my hands while the crime rate has gone up 25 percent in two years. Nor am I going to be bashful about talking about what it's like living in Downtown Area Command or Bolden Area Command or out in Northeast Area Command.
"Citizens over there don't have the luxury of having gate guards going into their community. They hear gunshots in their neighborhood at night, crime is on the upswing, there are gangs—I'm not going to sit here and be bashful and be politically correct. You get what you pay for."
There's no stopping him now. The fight is on, whether he has any backup coming or not.
"I'm not running for re-election here, I really don't care. I'm going to keep this the safest community that I possibly can. We need more police officers. We've had a 25 percent crime increase over two years. We're on pace this year for another 12 to 14 percent. It's not because the cops aren't working hard enough, cops are doing a great job. It's growth. As more people come, it becomes apparent we have needs that outgrow the ability for the natural taxation to work ... I'm fighting very hard for this ballot initiative. I know a lot of people come from an antitax standpoint [but] I look at Las Vegas as changed drastically from the town I grew up in.
"Roads are crowded, schools are packed to the gills, there's the highest ratio of students per teacher in the country, two-hour waits at the DMV—I get so sick of these letter-writers who don't want to pay more taxes—as far as I'm concerned, they can pack their clothes and move back to where they came from."
He stops. Sits back. Takes a breath. "I am what I am. I'm a cop.
"It gets me almost emotional."